Ideal Freecam Control Scheme?

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I’m making a game that heavily utilizes a free floating camera and i’m trying to make the controls for it really good.

The conditions I want are:

  • Good mouse-only camera controls
  • Good keyboard-only camera controls
  • Good Hybrid (Keyboard+Mouse) camera controls

What I’ve sorta locked down so far:

  • Mouse XY Axis = Look (obviously)
  • Middle Mouse = Panning (Hold to use XY Axis to pan, same as editor)
  • Mouse Wheel = Forwards/Backwards
  • WS = Forwards/Backwards
  • AD = Sideways Panning
  • Shift + WSAD = Same as WSAD but faster.

What’s Missing:

  • Roll (I have a few ideas, the most obvious one would be Q/E to roll and R to reset it, not sure how best to do it with mouse-only though)
  • Keyboard-Only Look (I’m quite stuck here, anything I do would either conflict with Roll binds or WASD)
  • Rotate around (Either fixed distance or a player specified spot)

Ideas I’ve played with:

  • AD = Look Left/Right (I abandoned the idea because modern gamers expect it to be strafe/pan)
  • Right Click/Hold = Rotate around fixed point (moves the cameraboom a fixed distance forward and sets the target arm length to the same distance; I’m not sure if i like it enough with a fixed distance to keep it, might be better to allow a player to specify a location to rotate around instead)

The simplest scheme i could think of for keyboard only would be

  • WS=fw/bw
  • AD=l/r look
  • EC=up/down look
  • shift+wasd = panning

which only leaves rolling which could possibly be something like shift+qe.

The reason I don’t do it this way is because people expect WSAD to behave the way it does in most games and expect at least shift+ws to equate to faster motion. There’s also the fact that it’d just not play as nicely with mouse look (mouse look benefits from AD being strafe/pan)

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

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Here’s a concise summary of an ideal free camera control scheme:

  • WASD/Arrow keys for movement

  • Mouse for looking/rotation

  • Mouse wheel for zooming

  • Right-click or middle mouse for panning

  • Shift for speed boost

  • Ctrl for slowing down

  • Specific keys for toggling modes (free cam, chase cam, etc.)

  • Specific keys for resetting, focusing, and collision detection

The key is to provide intuitive movement controls combined with easy access to camera speed adjustments, mode switching, and helpful utilities like panning, focusing, and collision toggling. Visual cues or an on-screen display can help communicate the available controls to the user.

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